The textile industry disposes of a substantial amount of mostly woven or knitted waste fabric material which is accumulated from various stages of the manufacturing process, such as trimmings, end pieces, faulty sections, experimental pieces and rejected pieces. At the present time, practically none of these waste materials is reclaimed or reused, because there has been no satisfactory method of reclaiming or reusing them. Rather, they are disposed of in refuse dumps or by chemical or physical means, and as so disposed, they constitute environmental pollutants. Furthermore, a large portion of marketed fabric materials, e.g. apparel, household textiles such as towels tablecloths and spreadsheets, and textiles from industrial laundries, which are ultimately discarded as waste and pollutants, would be suitable for reuse if a practical method of reprocessing or reclaiming these materials were available, but no such method is presently available.
Prior art document WO2010063079 discloses a method of forming nonwoven material, the method comprising receiving fibrous material comprising thermoplastic fibers, processing the fibrous material to produce short fibers, adding the short fibers to a preformed web, and heating and optionally compressing the preformed web to form a nonwoven material. The fibrous material concerned is off-cuts and processing wastes of mainly synthetic textile production, not recycled clothing or used textile products.
Prior art document WO0132405 discloses a method of forming a fibre reinforced thermoplastic composite sheet by sourcing waste fibrous material and waste thermoplastic material, producing a flock of the fibrous material and mixing the flock with the thermoplastic material before heating and pressing the mix to form the fibre reinforced thermoplastic composite sheet.